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Kindness: Polio survivor wages battle against crippling disease

Appalled after seeing ravages of polio in his native India, Ramesh Ferris has worked tirelessly to help eradicate it.

Fuelled by his high regard for Canadian heroes like Terry Fox, Ramesh Ferris rode on a hand cycle from Victoria, B.C., to Cape Spear, Nfld., in 2008, raising over $300,000 as part of his Cycle to Walk campaign.

A story ran in 2002 on the bureaucratic hurdles faced in arranging the adoption of Ramesh Ferris. Ottawa argued then that the young polio survivor would be a burden on Canada's health system.

Ramesh Ferris meets polio victim Kumar, 50, in Coimbatore in southern India during a visit in which he met his birth mother. It was scenes like this that steeled his resolve to continue to wage war on the ravaging disease.

Ramesh meets birth mother Lakshmi for the first time when he travelled back to India in 2002.
(Handout)

Ramesh Ferris stared into his mother Lakshmi’s face for the first time, as she broke into tears of joy.

It was 2002, and he had flown back to India for a reunion with the woman who gave him up to an orphanage in that country decades ago when he was barely a year old.

“The visit was about an hour but felt much longer due the overwhelming feelings I had and so much new information to absorb,” he says, recalling that meeting at her home in southern India.

Though it’s sad she had to give him up — she couldn’t afford to take proper care of him — Ferris realized at that moment that her sacrifice paved his path to adoption by Canadian parents and to access to surgery in this country that helped him overcome the ravages he suffered as a baby with polio, a disease that nearly permanently robbed him of the ability to walk.

During the reunion in India he also witnessed the unfortunate conditions in which polio survivors live. He was appalled.

“In India I saw what my life could have been. That’s when I decided to do advocacy work around polio,” Ferris says.

Ferris, 33, was recently inducted into the Canadian Disability Hall of Fame for his tireless work helping to raise awareness and money toward eradicating the crippling and potentially deadly disease.

His story is truly an inspiring one.

He was just 6 months old when he contracted polio in his native India. He crawled or needed to be carried until about age 3. But now, after three surgeries, he walks using a cane and has a brace on his right leg.

Fuelled by his high regard for Canadian heroes Terry Fox and Rick Hansen, Ferris rode on a hand cycle from Victoria, B.C., to Cape Spear, Nfld., in 2008, raising more than $300,000 as part of his Cycle to Walk campaign. Part of that money went to Rotary International’s End Polio Now campaign.

He has also travelled to numerous countries, including Afghanistan, Pakistan and the U.S., where he has met with health care workers, businessmen and government leaders in his push for education and more funding in the fight against polio.

Last year he attended the United Nations General Assembly, where he advocated for continued support in the fight against polio.

In addition, he volunteered his time and shared his personal story when he was sent to South Africa and Australia in recent years through the Bill and Melinda Gates Foundation, which has devoted massive sums of cash to fighting polio.

“My big message is if we don’t continue to fight (against polio), over the next 40 years 10 million children in the world will be paralyzed,’’ says Ferris, now a youth worker in Whitehorse, Yukon, where he lives with his wife Dagmar.

Those figures come from the World Health Organization.

Though vaccines have brought the infectious virus that causes paralysis, deformed limbs and, in the worst case, death under control worldwide — Canada was declared polio free in 1994 — it remains endemic in Afghanistan, Pakistan and Nigeria.

Battling polio wasn’t the only challenge Ferris had to overcome. He had plenty of hurdles to face getting to Canada as an adopted child coming from the Indian orphanage. It was run by Families for Children, a Canadian agency that shelters poor women and children in India and Bangladesh.

It took 14 months for Ron Ferris, an Anglican bishop in Whitehorse, and his wife Jan to bring their adopted son to Canada at age 2.

According to a Canadian Press story that ran in the Star in September 1982, Canada’s immigration department ruled Bishop Ferris couldn’t adopt Ramesh because he would be a burden on this country’s health care services, given his polio and the fact he didn’t walk properly.

But persistence paid off and Bishop Ferris appealed successfully to then federal immigration minister Lloyd Axworthy, who paved the way for Ramesh to come here through a special ministerial order.

Bishop Ferris, 68, who now lives in Langley, B.C. and works for the Anglican Network in Canada, says he’s pleased his son has devoted so much work to fighting polio.

“We’re thoroughly amazed with all he’s accomplished for polio eradication … it’s amazing his story is fresh again and he’s carrying on this wonderful work on behalf of children around the world,” he said.

“I do remember Bishop Ferris sleeping under his desk waiting for a call from Canadian Immigration in New Delhi to finally agree to issue a visa for Ramesh,” said Sandra Simpson, co-founder of Families for Children, in an email.

“Ramesh is a remarkable young man who has succeeded in every way we dreamed he would. He is indeed tireless with (regards to) making the world aware of the ravages of polio, and I am so proud of him,” she said.

“He has never forgotten his roots, and I think the fact he had a chance at a great future spurs him on.”

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